RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/the-three-blind-mice-of-the-university/

I wrote on X about the three blind mice college presidents (Gay of Harvard, Kornbluth of MIT, and Magill of University of Pennsylvania).

Recently, one blind mouse has tentatively resigned under pressure, Liz Magill, former dean of the Stanford Law School and lately president of the University of Pennsylvania.

An introductory note and warning: Long gone is the old university practice of appointing the most distinguished teachers and most accomplished scholars as deans, provosts, and presidents, on the theory that they would thus be uniquely qualified to evaluate faculty performance and the university’s intellectual tempo.

In the olden days, such esteemed faculty had to be coaxed from their departments for three to five years to “do administration” as a sort of campus public service. Not so Magill and Gay, (although Kornbluth has a record of medical and biological research).

In the long ago past, there was no ethos of young faculty jumping into junior administrative posts (e.g., “special assistant to the provost,” or “associate dean of Humanities for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) as the stepping stones in their administrative cursus honorum, which prove to be soon exclusive of teaching or research.

The end result is a Harvard President Claudine Gay, whose meager and undistinguished record of publication as an untenured Stanford political science professor should not have merited tenure at any UC or perhaps even a CSU campus (I served on retention, promotion, and tenure committees at CSU Fresno).

The result is that Gay was never in any position to evaluate the relative scholarly merits of her own faculty, or due to long tenure in administration and long absence from research and tenure, intellectually or temperamentally equipped to handle some brilliant House member interrogators (most of whom lacked extensive graduate degrees but knew far more from the real arena outside of the campus).

Watch videos of their lengthy House of Representatives testimonies. They did not really listen to the Representatives’ questions. Instead, they simply gave scripted, canned, and prepped boilerplate answers about “context”—even when asked about eliminationist speech calling for the erasure of Jews. Much less were they aware of how they sounded to those without experience in the gobbledygook gibberish of the campus.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-11-free-speech-at-harvard-penn-mit-and-other-elite-universities

“At Gay’s Harvard, if your speech supports the conservative position, the thinnest allegation against you can destroy your career. If you support the woke narrative, even the most explosive allegations against you can be buried.”

Six days ago, on December 5, the Presidents of three elite universities — Harvard, Penn and MIT — appeared at a Congressional hearing to testify about their responses to pro-Hamas and anti-semitic demonstrations and advocacy on their campuses. In the most widely-viewed exchange at the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked each of the Presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their codes of conduct. The three answered by emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech on their campuses, and by saying that they could not give a definitive answer as to whether calling for genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct, because the answer was “context-dependent.”

Over the intervening days, the responses of the three Presidents have generated widespread backlash, including harsh criticism from even some mainstream press sources, and even pushback from some major donors. The Presidents’ responses appeared to be, and were, tone deaf and highly legalistic. But were they wrong?

This may surprise you, but I’m going to stand up for the three Presidents on this particular point. If you have been a reader here for any substantial period, you know that I am close to what may be called a “free speech absolutist.” I think that people ought to be able to say even the most hateful and despicable things, short of immediate threats of violence. By saying such things they discredit themselves, and for the government (or a university or corporation) to claim the power to shut them up is an even worse problem than allowing the speech.

The problem with the statements of the three Presidents is not their position as to upholding freedom of speech for the pro-Hamas and anti-semitic speakers. The problem is that the Presidents don’t apply the same true free speech principles at all when it comes to political opinions with which they disagree, or that are out of line with current woke orthodoxy.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/right-deed-wrong-reason

Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.

Magill was part of a triumvirate of college presidents who testified before a House committee last week. Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth had been called to discuss the anti-Israel hatred embroiling their universities since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel. To call their performance robotic would insult robots. When asked a repeated question after their first evasion did not satisfy the questioner, these intellectual role models repeated their first evasion verbatim, maybe adding a cryptic non sequitur.

Congressman Jim Banks (R., Indiana) grilled Magill, for example, about a conference on Palestinian culture that the University of Pennsylvania had hosted two weeks before the Hamas terror attacks. Critics had demanded that Penn cancel the conference, due to the presence of alleged anti-Semites among its speakers. Penn allowed the gathering to continue, however, citing academic freedom.

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=https%3A%2F%2Fchristopherrufo.com%2Fp%2Fis-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist&utm_medium=email

Harvard president Claudine Gay has problems. Touted as the first black woman to run the nation’s most prestigious university, she assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal. As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.

We have obtained exclusive documentation demonstrating that President Gay may face yet another problem: plagiarism of sections of her Ph.D. dissertation, which would violate Harvard’s own stated policies on academic integrity. (We reached out to President Gay for comment, but received no response.)

Gay published her dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies,” in 1997, as part of her doctorate in political science from Harvard. The paper deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes. As evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.

First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language. Here is the original, from Bobo and Gilliam:

Using 1987 national sample survey data . . . the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.

https://thespectator.com/topic/university-presidents-testimony-ducking-gay-magill/

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question. 

You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.” 

“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”

I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.